Sixteen days left to take our country back from the heirs of the anti-federalists and give voice to the silent majority that the President loves to ridicule and marginalize — women, the children and grandchildren of immigrants, the Native Americans whose ancestors were here before any of ours, those who have worked hard to get a college or professional degree so that their children will have better lives than they did, the LGBT community, those who believe in science, those working hard at a minimum wage job trying to make ends meet, the list goes on and on under a president who only values those with money to burn and believes that there is no solemn commitment that we have made as a country that we can’t break merely because it is inconvenient to his agenda.
Over the next week or so, I will have a series of posts breaking down the election by region. Writing from the dead center of fly-over country, I am likely to miss (a lot of) the interesting local races and local color while trying to identify what seem to be the key races. So I am hopeful that we will get some comments pointing out what has slipped under the national radar.
We start with New England — home to the Patriots, the Red Sox, and a tradition of moderate Yankee Republicanism that is on the verge of needing Last Rites (represented primarily at the national level by the Cowardly Lioness of the Senate — Susan Collins — stumbling desperately in the last two years of her career between the conflicting tasks of keeping a majority of Maine Republicans primary voters happy and keeping the majority of Maine general election voters happy).
Maine is an interesting state because it has opted to adopt the Australian system of preferential voting at least for the federal offices. (Court decisions have barred the implementation of preferential voting at the general election for state offices.) The Australian experience is that it is difficult but not impossible for the trailing candidate to win the race on “second choice” votes. (In both primary races in which preferences came into play, the candidate who led after the first round ultimately won the election.) Obvious factors in whether the trailing candidate win are the gap after the first round and how close the leading candidate is to a majority after the first round. Independent Senator Angus King should be re-elected. At this point, the big question is whether the “official” Democratic candidate will gain enough first choice votes to keep Senator King beneath 50%. Even with preferential voting not applying to the Governor’s race, it looks like the Democrat — Janet Mills — will win ending the nightmare that has been Governor LePage. The race for Maine’s second district (the only Congressional seat in New England currently held by Republicans) could come down to the second choice of voters. Most of the polling shows a neck-and-neck race, and I am dubious that any of the polling companies are polling using a ranked choice system.
Vermont is interesting in a different way. In Vermont, a candidate for governor needs 50% of the vote. If nobody gets 50%, the legislature chooses the winner. There are only a handful of times that the winner has failed to get 50% and, each of those times, the legislature went with the candidate who finished first. However, I don’t know if those past races reflect the fact that the winner’s party had the majority of seats or if legislators acted in a non-partisan fashion. There is not a lot of polling in this race. What is out there suggests that the Republican incumbent is likely to finish first but it is unclear if he will clear 50%. There is likely to be a strong Democratic majority in the legislature; so — if the incumbent only gets 49.5% — the question is whether Democrats in the legislature would choose a Democratic candidate who trailed by 4-5% over the Republican who finished first. You also have Senator Bernie Sanders looking certain to be re-elected. The question is how his refusal to accept the Democratic nomination for Senator will influence his race seeking the Democratic nomination for President in 2020 (where he actually does need that nomination to get on the ballot in all 50 states unlike the situation in Vermont).
The rest of New England seems to be mostly calm. Senators Murphy, Warren, and Whitehouse seem set for re-election. The Democrats seem likely to keep all of the House seats that they currently hold. The only seat that seems like it could even be sort of close is New Hampshire’s 1st district. While Democrats would like to take back the Governor’s mansion in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the Republican governors in those states are personally popular even if the Republican party isn’t. And in Connecticut, while the unpopularity of Governor Dan Malloy had given Republicans hopes of gaining that state, former Senate candidate Ned Lamont appears to have solidified enough of the Democratic majority in that state to be the likely winner.
Ballot questions in New England include a trio of measure in Massachusetts — one capping the number of patients per nurse in health care facilities, one challenging Citizen United, and one an attempted “veto” of legislation prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity. New Hampshire has a very dangerous constitutional amendment on the ballot. The proposed amendment simply states that “An individuals right to live free from governmental intrusion in private or personal information is natural, essential, and inherent.” The reason that this amendment is dangerous is that it uses very broad terms with no clear limits for courts to apply. As we have seen recently in the First Amendment context in the U.S. Supreme Court, judges can use broad rights to block what most people would consider fair and reasonable legislation.
In short, in New England, Democrats are realistically looking at gaining one U.S. House seat and one Governor position (with a very outside shot at a second).
